Generation InterrailWhat Europe means to the young

IT IS Sunday night at the rooftop bar of the Wombat’s Hostel in Berlin and the tequila is starting to flow. But there is still time for a quick chat about the European Union’s common agricultural policy. Drew, a sparky 20-year-old University of London student, cannot abide the “mad” subsidies the EU pays to its farmers. “In many ways,” he adds, “I’m an anarchist.” And yet he thinks Britain would be foolish to vote to leave the European Union in the referendum the government will hold by the end of 2017.

Drew and his 19-year-old girlfriend Emma, like millions of young Europeans before them, are spending the summer in a carefree haze of travel and fun, the fruits of the freedom afforded by an Interrail pass. Launched in 1972 to mark the 50th anniversary of an international rail industry group, Interrail was a single ticket that granted access to a large part of Europe’s rail network, turning much of the continent west of the Iron Curtain into a playground for youngsters as they hopped on and off trains, guzzling cheap booze and meeting like-minded souls along the way. Over the years Interrail’s popularity has waned in the face of competing entertainments like low-cost flights; sales peaked in the mid-1980s at over 300,000 passes a year. Yet numbers have picked up in recent years; last year 230,000 Europeans bought a pass, almost one-quarter of them from Britain. And for many of the young travellers whom your correspondent met during a five-day jaunt through Europe, the wide-eyed rite-of-passage quality of an Interrail trip appears as strong as ever.

Interrail’s spirit of openness long seemed to foreshadow developments within Europe itself, as walls tumbled, borders disappeared and currencies melted into one another (Interrail expanded to the ex-communist east in 1994). In today’s more troubled Europe, though, tested by financial and migration crises, the summer rail adventure has taken on new connotations. Europe’s young have borne the brunt of recent economic woes: across the EU unemployment for those under 25, although dropping, still stands at over 20%, and in Spain and Greece around half the young workforce is jobless. In the early 2000s the median income of Europeans between 16 and 24 was growing faster than that of other generations; today the reverse is true. Home and car ownership are down and university debt is up. Particularly in southern Europe, many are facing the prospect of a standard of living worse than that of their parents.

Yet this generation is better travelled and educated than any that came before. Around two-thirds of school-leavers across the EU’s 28 member states enter higher education today; just 18% did in the (much smaller) European Economic Community in 1972. Jim Hadfield, who runs the Circus Hostel in Berlin, says his guests know far more about the city’s history than when he arrived in 1998.

Asked what the EU means to them, 57% of Europeans between 15 and 24 years old cite the freedom to travel, work and study anywhere they like. To many young Interrailers it seems the natural order of things; the border checks they encounter on leaving the EU, at times delivered with an impatient rap on the cabin window as their sleeper train enters the Balkans, arrive as a shock and are seen as almost impertinent.

Yet in recent weeks the travellers have in some parts of Europe encountered a sharper reminder that the freedoms they enjoy are not shared by everyone. Hamish, a 24-year-old British chemical-engineering graduate, says his “jaw dropped” when he alighted at Budapest’s Keleti station to find himself confronted with the sight of thousands of migrants, mainly Syrians, waiting to be granted permission to board trains to Austria and Germany. Gregor, a thoughtful Bavarian student Interrailing from Hungary to Greece, found himself thinking about the plight of the refugees whose journey he was making in reverse. As the child of Polish parents who fled to Germany in 1988 he notes that he has more reason than many to cherish the freedoms Europe can offer.

Others fear what the migrant crisis reveals about their fellow citizens. Katharina, a 21-year-old mathematics student from Vienna travelling throughout the Balkans, is not worried about her own future. (At 10.8%, Austria’s youth-unemployment rate is the third lowest in the EU.) But the xenophobic reaction of many of her fellow Austrians to the refugees spilling into the country makes her worry, she says, that one day she might no longer feel at home there.

Similarly Nico and Isa, who have travelled from Germany’s east to visit a Star Wars exhibition in Cologne, cite antagonism towards foreigners as their main reason for pessimism about Europe. The fence erected by Hungary’s government along its border with Serbia, says Nico, is an unhappy reminder of the old east German state.

Like most Germans the pair were surprised to hear that much of Europe admires Germany’s handling of the refugee crisis. Yet not everyone takes such a liberal view. Julien, a French engineer making his way through the Balkans to Turkey, explains that he pities the refugees but doesn’t think Europe can handle them all. Soon afterwards he slips into talk of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader.

Interrailers are disproportionately educated and affluent; a multi-country pass starts at €281 ($315). Yet they are hardly immune to economic difficulty. Hamish is frustrated to find himself living with his parents again as he prepares to begin another degree and accumulate more debt, having failed to land the right job in London. Szyman, a Polish musician encountered next to his double bass on a crowded train bound for Berlin, says he could tell something was up a few years ago when his Dutch orchestra saw its public subsidy cut by €1m a year and was forced to lay him off. Having sneaked into the first-class section of a train to Prague, four mechanical-engineering undergraduates from Aberdeen headed for careers in the offshore oil-and-gas industry are more interested in drinking cheap Czech beer than fretting about their careers. But one confides that the drop in the oil price has cast a shadow over his prospects.

The EU’s greatest cheerleaders today are to be found among those who cannot fully share its benefits. Your correspondent met Syrian refugees at Belgrade’s railway station who expressed their excitement at the prospect of rejoining family in Dortmund, and young Turks on their way to Prague who contrast the freedoms of Europe with the creeping authoritarianism of their own government.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "What Europe means to the young"